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Before 2018, very few people had ever heard of OnlyFans. At the time it was a two-year-old website launched by Tim Stokely, a U.K.-based entrepreneur in the adult content industry. His previous sites—GlamGirls and Customs4U—hadn’t taken off. But he had hopes for OnlyFans, a marketplace where creators could sell exclusive photos and videos to users. “Our thinking was always, ‘OK, what if you could build a platform where it’s exactly [the same] or very similar to existing on social media, but with the key difference being the payment button?” Stokely said in a 2021 interview with GQ magazine.

Though Stokely claims the site was never marketed to any specific industry, it soon gained traction as a personalized porn marketplace. In 2017, one year after he founded the company with his brother and father, a retired investment banker, there were around $3 million transactions recorded on OnlyFans. The next year, Stokely received an email from another porn entrepreneur, an American named Leonid Radvinsky who had some ideas for the website. “We were really, really impressed with his thoughts,” Stokely later told The Financial Times, noting that he “soon realized that we shared a similar vision for the platform.” In October that year, Radvinsky bought an at least 75% stake in the then nascent company for an unknown sum. One month later, he took over 100%, company records show.

This would prove a watershed moment for the business. In financial statements published earlier this month, Fenix International, the parent company of OnlyFans, revealed it made $485 million in profits on $1.3 billion in revenue in 2023. That’s up from $404 million on $1.1 billion in 2022. The platform counts more than 305 million global users who spent a combined $6.6 billion last year on subscriptions to their favorite creators. It costs anywhere from $4.99 to $49.99 to subscribe to a creator on OnlyFans (the website takes a 20% cut). Last month, OnlyFans ranked as the No. 65 most popular website in the U.S. before Xfinity, Yelp and Spotify, according to analytics platform Similarweb.

OnlyFans’ soaring popularity has unleashed a massive payday for Radvinsky. The 42-year-old billionaire made headlines last month after paying himself a whopping $472 million dividend last year, the equivalent of about $1.2 million a day. He’s........

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